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| Niccolò Billy (engraver) after Giovanni Domenico Campiglia (painter) Portrait of Pier Leone Ghezzi ca. 1734 engraving National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Purification of Aeneas in the River Numicius ca. 1725 oil on canvas Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Susanna and the Elders ca. 1725-35 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Musical Gathering before 1755 oil on canvas Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Martyrdom of St Clement of Rome 1724 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Pope Clement XI in Procession in St Peter's Square before 1721 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Cardinal Vincenzo Maria Orsini (future Pope Benedict XIII) preserved from earthquake wreckage by the miraculous intervention of St Philip Neri before 1730 oil on canvas Chiesa di San Filippo, Matelica |
Five Sonnets for Summer Storage in the High School Book Room
1.
In here, sunlight's fingers never rummage.
For the most part, the exposed spines of shelved
paperbacks – perfect bound with low-wattage
fluorescence, a glue aglow – have been halved
by brutal cracks, those fault lines a careless
perusal rules into place. Yes, I dread
the eleventh grader who parted this
crisp copy of The Collector, who spread
it flat as a prized butterfly, leaning
his mind on two fine wings of Fowles' words
until the spine finally creased. Reading
eyes should light upon their leaf like small birds.
Books deserve the care of Golding's Piggy
cradling his conch, his democracy.
2.
When judging books by cover, don't send down
Lennon's killer, The Cather in the Rye
in pocket-sized paperback – Little Brown's
falsely accused suspect. Some covers lie
to readers, but not Salinger's, bound in
blank blurbless white, as nude as nuns' habits.
And though some fingers find cheap stock a sin,
Little Brown's thumb-blackening newsprint sits
well with my faith. Small as a Gideon
Bible – minus God, guilt, and gold-edging –
the pallid paperback tends to darken
with every semester's fingerprinting
but its soul isn't, as Holden would deem,
phony. Words, not their grimy covers, gleam.
3.
Pity, piled in stacks for summer. One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, its cover
forced to read (over and over) blurbs on
the flush, pointblank backside of another.
The insane also learn to loathe themselves
by synopsis when stood on their edges
and lined up along reinforced steel shelves
like suicides manning their last ledges.
Novels, packed and pressed close together, fear
madness, fear Kurtz's horror the horror
as each UPC, confronting its rear
copy's cover, clangs shut like a cell door.
So shun fresh paintings. Liberate the old.
Summer sentences colour paper gold.
4.
Although novels must endure the summer
some texts anticipate September fame.
A crude archivist, the inside cover
provides space to immortalize your name,
year, homeroom, crush – the opportunity
to enter history. Young signatures
are scrawled kinked knots – shoelaces hastily
snarled. I bested this book, they assure,
and unseam'd its theme. I strode with Macbeth
towards King Duncan's bed (while facing note
clarified Tarquin) and predicted death
for Piggy, sucked to sea like a small boat.
Holding the very thing Ray Bradbury
torched at four fifty-one, I felt lucky.
5.
A previous reader's PC outrage
annotates this edition of Huck Finn.
The word "RACIST," scrawled across every page
in red pencil, wends its way from margin
to margin, trying to rouse the type – straight
as a company of Confederates –
to lay down weapons and emancipate
the word "nigger," typeset by bayonets.
It wants, that cry of racism, to spear
marching rows of imperialist text,
to stone, bottle, and rain on riot gear,
exhume and lynch dead white Twains by their necks.
But if we excise all the books that prick
how will Shylock bleed and prove anemic?
– Jason Guriel (2009)
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Portrait of an Augustinian Nun ca. 1725-30 oil on canvas Toledo Museum of Art (Ohio) |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Portrait of a Watchmaker before 1755 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Portrait of Carlo Albani ca. 1708 oil on canvas Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Portrait of Maria Clementina Sobieska (wife of the Old Pretender) ca. 1730 oil on canvas Wilanów Palace Museum, Warsaw |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Portrait of Cardinal Gabriele Filippucci 1706 oil on canvas Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Portrait of Sarafino Falzacappa before 1755 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Portrait Head of a Young Man 1716 drawing Princeton University Art Museum |